Responsiveness to customer issues and needs has become increasingly important to most modern businesses. Many, if not most, large customer driven organizations maintain a staff of customer service personnel. These staffs may include trouble shooters who can provide technical guidance as well as logistic specialist who can identify why a product was not shipped on time or why a product did not arrive on time.
Typically, as organizations increase in size, the number of customer issues received and the number of customer service personnel responding to those issues also increase. Unfortunately, the increased number of issues and personnel tend to make maintaining a record of customer issues and appropriate responses to those issues more difficult. This may be especially true for multi-national organizations.
At present, conventional data management tools for electronically tracking and reporting customer issues and appropriate responses are inadequate. Customer issue data, if collected at all, is collected in an inconsistent fashion and is, generally, difficult to share cross-functionally or globally. Moreover, the information gleaned from inconsistently collected data cannot confidently be treated as accurate.
Conventional techniques for managing customer issues and experiences include manually inputting an issue and an appropriate response for that issue into a spreadsheet (e.g., an Excel spreadsheet). This technique is inadequate for a number of reasons.
For example, requiring customer service personnel to fill out spreadsheets is labor intensive and time consuming. Additionally, conventional techniques often yield inconsistent and unreliable information. Other shortcomings include storage of data in a format, which often cannot be easily searched or interrogated. As a result, customer service personnel generally find it difficult to identify past issues and resolution data when working to solve a current issue that is similar to a past issue. Moreover, it may be difficult to generate trend reports necessary to identify areas in which the organization has seen either a significant improvement or a significant decline in performance.